Saturday, November 29, 2014

Advent 2014: The Impossible God

The earth spins and circles, one moving speck in a vastness beyond all imagining. Trillions of other dancing bodies weave and travel across a universe stretching over fifteen billion years. Time moves slowly, if it exists at all, across the night sky of cosmic infinity. The nebula hesitates…

And on earth, at one single point in time, in one single place, a man and woman travel through the night, under sparkling night skies, on a path to eternity.

The impossibility of it all… one single child born one single night in one single stable on one single planet, changing every single thing. Why that night? Why that stable?

The nebula explodes, and on that Bethlehem night, God transforms all at once from the universal to the intimate, and becomes unmistakably present, unmistakably vulnerable, and unmistakably real. A touch, a cry, a waving arm. Helpless without compassion, unable to grow without love, unable to continue without warm caress, unable to thrive without tender touch, God requires, demands, and receives, at least for one night, the love of the world.

And so the cosmic God of all the universe reveals a Spirit most present, most immediate, most human. And proclaims that every moment matters, and every journey, and every person, and every thing, in the interconnected web of life.